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So last month, I talked a bit aboutsexual violence. And when most people think about this topic, they imagine male perpetrators and female victims. But since my personal experience is in gay male contexts, I tend to think of male victims first. And male victims, well isn’t that a thing? You have all the usual myths about sexual violence, and problems with how we treat victims after the fact; but on top of that, you have even more issues that are specific to male victims.

In this post, I’ll discuss three disparate topics related to male victims. First, I’ll talk about some male-specific misconceptions. Second, I’ll talk about prevalence statistics, and complain about how people have collected these statistics. Third, I’ll talk about feminism.

This is a brief statement of my opinion on the Aziz Ansari case. Content note: rape.

There’s a direct analogy between rape and drowning. Drowning looks very different in real life vs the movies. But nobody demands that people behave more stereotypically while drowning. When people fail to behave stereotypically, still nobody denies that it was really drowning. And nobody derails the conversation by insisting that nearby swimmers can’t be treated as criminals just because they don’t recognize drowning.

I understand that among SJ-oriented people, there is some controversy about the Aziz Ansari case. A lot of people saying that it was wrong, but not sexual assault. My stance is that it was a fairly typical story of rape, making it a troubling demonstration of people’s inability to recognize rape. Yes, “rape” instead of “sexual assault”, because it was penetrative–that should be straightforward. But the part that gives people trouble, is that Grace didn’t behave as they expected a non-consenting person should, and they think the typical person would have great difficulty recognizing the signs. To this I say, okay, but please update your expectations. This is what drowning looks like.

I recently wrote a guide to terms relating to sexual violence, and I included brief descriptions of a few common models of consent. While I do not reject these models of consent, I do advocate a lesser-known model of consent. It’s known as “consent as a felt sense”.

The communication vs the message

The standard narrative of consent is someone saying “yes” or “no” to a sexual proposition. This narrative isn’t entirely accurate. Studies show that saying “no” is a disfavored way to express refusal, and people commonly couch or soften their refusals, both inside and outside sexual contexts. It’s also well-known that consent can be expressed non-verbally. Once we get past the myths and legends, we see that consent isn’t about saying one particular word or another. It’s about communication, by whatever means are effective.

But the thing about communication, is that there is a message that we are trying to communicate. Perhaps the intended message is “I consent”, but this quickly devolves into recursive circle. “I wish to communicate to you that I wish to communicate to you that I consent.” Upon reflection, we come to the conclusion that “I consent” means “I am okay with this”.

When I started out writing about sexual violence, I was confused about many of the terms surrounding it. I didn’t even know, until someone told me, that “sexual violence” was an all-encompassing term. So I’m writing a guide to terminology, of the kind I wish I had years ago. My aim is to go beyond a glossary, not just providing definitions but also commenting on connotations and practical usage.

Categories of sexual violence

Sexual violence – Sexual violence is a super-category that includes any sexual (or sexually charged) act that violates someone’s consent. That includes sexual assault, sexual coercion, sexual harassment, and child sexual abuse (all of which are to be defined later). Note that sexual violence is a term used by public health advocates and activists, not by the legal system; not all sexual violence is illegal.

In my experience, definitions of sexual violence can be confusing. For example, the NSVRC says sexual violence is when “someone forces or manipulates someone else into unwanted sexual activity without their consent,” and then proceeds to list examples which do not obviously fall under its own definition, such as spying on sexual acts. If you’re not sure whether to go with the explicit definition, or the list of examples, always go with the list, which has more consensus than the literal definition.

Sexual assault – Sexual assault is non-consensual sexual touching. Common examples include unwanted kissing, groping certain body parts, and rape. Sexual assault is also a legal term, although at least in the US, there is a distinction between assault (the threat of violence) and battery (the violence itself). Outside of legal contexts, “sexual assault” usually refers to what is legally called “sexual battery”.

This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2015. I made a few minor updates, but all the speculation still applies today.

In my analysis of the 2014 AVEN Survey of online asexual communities, I showed that only 12% of aces (aces = people on the asexual spectrum) are men. According to my numbers, the fraction of asexuals who are men is similar. [Update: The 2015 Asexual Census finds the same result.] Someone asked me why that is, and I thought I’d make my answer public.

Extant data

In a community survey of AVEN in 2008, 28% of asexuals were men. Another community survey in 2011 reported 13% of aces were men. A Spanish-language community survey in 2013 reports that 36% of asexuals were assigned male at birth.

These are all community surveys conducted online, and they only tell us about people in the various online communities. They do not tell us about asexuals or asexual-spectrum people in general.

However, there was also an academic study conducted in 2004, based on a national probability sample in the UK in 1994. In that study 35% of asexuals were men. In theory, this should tell us about asexuals in general, although there are many reasons to worry about systematic biases.

I dislike mainstream movies almost categorically. They cost too much to make, which means they need to appeal to broad audiences, and it turns out that broad audiences really like Hero’s Journey stories full of standard archetypes and tropes. The original Star Wars trilogy was a case in point, so you might imagine I don’t care for it.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi was okay though. One of the things I liked about it was its clear rejection of the Hero’s Journey. Usually in these stories–and Star Wars stories in particular–you have the hero take a huge risk, and achieve a brilliant victory. The Last Jedi makes nods to this trope, by focusing on characters who take huge risks to strike at the enemy’s critical weakpoint. But the characters fail, and in the process they screw up the more intelligent plans of Vice Admiral Holdo. (Later, Holdo herself takes a huge risk to strike at the enemy’s weakpoint, but I won’t dwell on this bit of thematic incoherence because I’m sure someone in the comments will explain how it all makes sense.)

My reaction is, The Last Jedi sure is rejecting something, but is it really toxic masculinity? The whole idea of small band of heroes taking a huge risk to achieve a linchpin victory, that’s something that mostly happens in fiction (and Star Wars in particular), not in the real world. Neither the rejection nor acceptance of that trope seems to say anything about the real world. It’s just a dispute between works of fiction. I agree more with the critic who says The Last Jedi doesn’t care what you think about Star Wars.

Last month, I mentioned my past experience with sexual assault and rape. And I said I was fortunate to have never suffered from PTSD, unlike many other victims who have suffered from PTSD. This is my way of saying that other people had it worse than me.

If you’ve heard any number of accounts of victims of sexual harassment or sexual violence, you know that “somebody else had it worse” is a common trope. Saying, “I don’t want to take up space from other people with more extreme stories.” Or, “I don’t want anyone to think I’m making a huge deal over something so little.” Or, “I’m not sure this even belongs in the category of sexual assault.”

In the other extreme, some people argue that we shouldn’t ever compare different experiences of sexual violence at all. We’re told that there is only one kind of rape, all sexual violence is bad, end of story.

I have issues with both of these sides, and wish to find a happy medium.